Kitschmas by Request: Liver Paté Board!

 

Kitschmas 2021: Egg Balls!

 

Egg Balls

Mrs. Charles Waring – Charleston Receipts

(Video above doubles the recipe)

4 eggs

1/8 pound butter

Salt and red pepper

Worcestershire sauce

Celery seed

Bread crumbs

Cream hard boiled eggs with butter. Season to taste with red pepper, Worcestershire sauce and celery seed. Make into balls, put in ice box to set, then roll in rich bread crumbs that have been browned in oven. Equal parts of mashed fish and a few pinches of chopped parsley may be added to creamed eggs and rolled in bread crumbs. Makes 16-18 balls.

Kitschmas 2021: Anchovy Eggs!

Anchovy Eggs from "Swiss Cooking" by Anne Mason, c. 1964.

6 hard-boiled eggs

1 lb. tomatoes, peeled

salt and pepper to taste

1 small tin anchovy fillets

lettuce leaves

mayonnaise

Cut eggs in halves lengthwise and scoop out yolks, pressing through sieve into a basin. Cut 1 large tomato in halves and scoop out seeds, then chop the flesh very small. Chop three anchovy fillets and add with tomato to the egg yolks. Blend well together, adding a little of the anchovy oil is too stiff, and season to taste. Fill egg whites with mixture and arrange on lettuce leaves. Garnish with tomato slices and remaining anchovy fillets. Serve mayonnaise separately.

Eggs a la King!

Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Cook Book, 1959

Happy Easter! Ish. I hope it was splendid for you, and equally I hope that you've come here looking for things to do with all your leftover hard-boiled eggs, I've got just the thing.

(It involves cream sauce, there's literally nothing that could go wrong.)

And before I forget - if you're anywhere near Helena or Butte, Montana, Dr. Husband and I will be performing there later this week. Just go one over to the Montana Early Music Festival for all the information.

Now, Eggs a la King is the sort of thrifty meal I grew up on, in a time when no leftover was allowed to linger in the fridge until it was time to be thrown out. Everything thing had a use and every single scrap of food was put to use within four days of its original purpose (to be honest, in mmy zaftig family there were very few leftovers after a family meal, despite the fact that that if there were four people coming to dinner, my mother cooked for ten. But.)

First of all, you need to be steaming your eggs instead of boiling. I tried it for the first time tonight and I will never do it any other way. They were cooked perfectly after 15 minutes in the steamer basket, no holes had to be pricked in the shell, no cracking while cooking, and the shell peeled off like magic.  

Second of all, I believe I could eat almost anything if it came in a cream sauce.

So, Eggs a la King. Here's the recipe as it appears in 1959's Better Homes and Gardens Holiday Cook Book:

To 2 cups medium white sauce, add 6 sliced hard-cooked eggs, on 3-ounce can (2/3 cup) broiled sliced mushrooms, drained, and 2 tablespoons catsup. Heat. Pour over hot buttered toast; top with thick broiled tomato slices. Makes 6 servings.

I'm flattered that BH&G thought I would have white sauce at the ready, but I didn't. For authenticity, I used a basic Betty Crocker recipe:

 

2 tablespoons butter or margarine

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 

1/4 teaspoon salt  

1/8 teaspoon pepper 

1 cups milk  

In 1 1/2-quart saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Stir in flour, salt and pepper. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is smooth and bubbly; remove from heat. Gradually stir in milk. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly; boil and stir 1 minute.

Dr. Husband was literally jumping in his skin to taste it, and what did he think? 

 

Our Rating: Zero Screaming Husbands!

(all dishes are rated from one to five Screaming Husbands. One Screaming Husband equals a happy home where all problems are solved during cocktail hour. Five Screaming Husbands signals the beginning of divorce proceedings.)

Eggshell Ornaments!

Party Sandwich!

Cookindex (1958) via vintagerecipecards.com

I'm on the road this week, but that won't stop me from cooking up potentially-disgusting recipes to foist on unsuspecting husbands all across America.  This week, we take a trip to lovely-ish Florence, SC, where Dr. and Mrs. Substitute were kind enough to put me up and help me in my culinary endeavors.

Florence, as you probably already know, is the site of an almost-calamity in 1958, when an atomic bomb accidentally fell out of a plane and landed in someone's back yard. Whoops!  Luckily the plutonium core didn't detonate, but there's a crater nonetheless, which you can visit to this day!

On a lighter note, Florence is also the soon-to-be-home of Seminar Brewing, Florence's first commercial craft brewery! (I can personally, and highly, recommend the Carver Peanut Butter Porter).

So, off we go. Party Sandwich is one of the gems presented by our friends at Vintage Recipe Cards, an invaluable source of kitschy recipes when I'm away from my cookbooks and in a jam. If you're too lazy to click the link, here's the recipe:

1 small round loaf Italian bread
Softened butter or margarine
Ham and Celery Filling, see below
Curried Egg Filling, see below
2 tomatoes, thinly sliced
Avocado Filling, see below
Cream cheese, about 1/2 lb.
Light cream
Sliced stuffed olives
Springs of parsley

Cut loaf, crosswise, into four thick slices. Spread each slice with butter. Spread bottom sliced with Ham and Celery Filling. Top with second bread sliced; spread with Curried Egg Filling. Top with slices of tomato and third bread slice. Spread with Avocado Filling; top with remaining bread slice. Mash cream cheese; stir in enough cream so cheese will spread easily; beat until smooth. Spread on top and sides of loaf. Garnish with olive slices and parsley. Cut into wedges to serve. Makes about 12 servings.

HAM AND CELERY FILLING: Combine 1 cup ground cooked ham, 1/2 cup chopped celery and enough mayonnaise to moisten.
CURRIED EGG FILLING: Combine 4 finely chopped hard-cooked eggs, 1/2 teaspoon curry powder and enough mayonnaise to moisten.
AVOCADO FILLING: Mash 2 fully-ripe avocados; add 2 tablespoons highly-seasoned French dressing. String until well blended.

You'll notice that the first step is to spread the bread with butter. This seems to have been a thing back in the day, at least according to my grandmother Mrs. White, who started every dish that could even be tangentially considered a sandwich (including hot dogs) with a liberal spread.

Once your bread is sufficiently buttered, you can start assembling your fillings. Mrs. Dr. Substitute was a great help in the kitchen this week, as was Chester, a great huge lumbering creature with two different colored eyes.

Mrs. Dr. Substitute was concerned that the ham "salad" didn't contain pickle relish; I argued that the sweetness might clash with the curried egg mixture, but in hindsight, the dish as a whole is such a mishmash of mayonnaise-y flavors that it probably wouldn't have mattered a whit.

I must also praise Mrs. Dr. Substitute for her insistence on homemade French dressing, she made about a gallon just to provide the measly two tablespoons needed for the avocado layer.

Once you start adding mayonnaise into your mixtures, the gentlemen in the house will sit up and take notice!

So, once you assemble and combine all your layers, you will be faced with icing your creation. I recommend securing the "sandwich" with a skewer before icing (and leave it in place for the slicing). Also, be prepared to have some slopover avocado and egg mix in to your icing.

When you're finished, add your olive and parsley garnish. You'll arrive at something roughly looking like this:

Based on our scientific slicing technique, I'd estimate that this sandwich will provide about 8 servings.

But enough about science, how does it taste?

And, seriously, if you want to be a guest kitchen, drop me a line!

Our Rating: Two Screaming Husbands!
(all dishes are rated from one to five Screaming Husbands. One Screaming Husband equals a happy home where all problems are solved during cocktail hour. Five Screaming Husbands signals the beginning of divorce proceedings.)

Egg Balls

Egg Balls
submitted by Mrs. Charles Waring
Charleston Receipts p. 27

I'm sure there's a "which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg" joke in here somewhere, but it's not coming to me.

As mentioned last time, a recent jaunt through Pilot Mountain, NC, snagged me a 1950 copy of "Charleston Receipts", still available in a recent edition on Amazon, if you're interested. With treats like the above, as well as "Mrs. Alston Pringle's Calf's Head Soup", "Hog's Head Cheese", and "Ham Paste", how could you resist?

As to the book's title, my crack Googling skills tell me that receipt and recipe both derive from the Latin recipere, "to receive or take". Receipt was first used in medieval English as a formula or prescription for a medicinal preparation (Chaucer is the first known user, in the Canterbury Tales of about 1386). The sense of “a written statement saying that money or goods have been received” only arrived at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Recipe is the imperative, "take!", from the same Latin root. It was traditionally the first word in a prescription, heading the list of ingredients. This was often abbreviated to a letter R with a bar through the leg, the origin of the standard "Rx" abbreviation in pharmaceutical circles. Recipe has been used alongside receipt since the eighteenth century in the sense of cookery instructions, gradually replacing it over time. 

It’s by no means entirely defunct even today. It was used on British television, up to the late 1990s, on  Two Fat Ladies, featuring Clarissa Dickson Wright and the late Jennifer Paterson, who invariably spoke of receipts. It is also said with regularity by my mother.

So, on to the Egg Balls.  I had a house full of company when I made them, and, being by now a minor regional celebrity, the prospect of Egg Balls being made caused quite a bit of excitement, as one would imagine, one guest even insisting on observing the creative process from start to finish.

The recipe:

4 eggs

1/2 pound butter

Salt and red pepper

Worcestershire sauce

Celery seed

Bread crumbs

Cream hard boiled eggs with butter. Season to taste with red pepper, Worcestershire sauce and celery seed. Make into balls, put in ice box to set, then roll in rich bread crumbs that have been browned in oven. Equal parts of mashed fish and a few pinches of chopped parsley may be added to creamed eggs and rolled in bread crumbs. Makes 16-18 balls.

A couple of disclaimers: I didn't have celery seed, so I used celery salt. I also used bread crumbs right out of the box, assuming that modern technology had eliminated the need to brown them myself.  

I also opted out of the mashed fish suggestion.

What we thought: My guests, for some strange reason, were over the moon with this dish. (But they're young, they lack the life experience to discern a really fine canapé.) The Egg Balls were so popular, I'm not sure Husband even had a chance to try one. As for me, it's not something I could exactly complain about. They taste like egg on buttered toast, if you took the egg on buttered toast, rolled it into a ball, and stuck it in the freezer for 15 minutes. I suppose 1950's hostesses needed something familiar-tasting-yet-oddly-too-cold to serve to guests in the days before you could buy 1500 pinwheel sandwiches at Sam's Club.

Our Rating: Two screaming husbands

(all dishes are rated from one to five Screaming Husbands. One Screaming Husband equals a happy home where all problems are solved during cocktail hour. Five Screaming Husbands signals the beginning of divorce proceedings.)